Hey guys, I don't post much but I've been using these forums for years now and it's been a great resource to help me reach my full potential in tanking.

I do have some questions however regarding the challenge mode instances. A few weeks ago I finally managed to give some guildies the confidence they needed to start perusing the CM dungeons as a fun time outside of raids. Our first time in one together was Temple of the Jade Serpent. Ended up getting silver with very little trouble on our first attempt. Followed that up with Mogu'shan vaults for silver and Halls with silver. So we fully understand that silver isn't a difficult goal to go for. We decided start going for golds in the ones we already knew, and the large pulls become incredibly difficult for me to manage my life.

Our primary focus at the moment is Jade Serpent. We've managed to get a really good handle on the pulls usually make it to Mari and burn him with ~11m or more to spare. The areas we've decided that our biggest improvement lie in the pulling of larger packs leading up to the bridge and larger pulls in the room with the 3rd boss. These packs just absolutely wreck me. I dip in health a ton, I get silenced almost constantly by the small adds and can't utilize cool-downs effectively unless I spam them and get lucky. If I use frost traps to slow and kite to reduce the damage intake the adds take too long to kill, stuns end up hitting DRs pretty quick after shadowfury. Overall my point is I feel really squishy when going for golds and getting the larger pulls done.

I'm looking for help from any protection paladins who are still currently running gold modes. With as often as changes get made to our class I really need updated information to see difference in opinions. I need to figure out if there is something I'm doing wrong. I feel like I have a really good grasp on how to rotate cool-downs, keep up SS follow rotations and positioning.

So my questions include:

What consumables do you prefer? I currently run Earth Flask, 450 stam food and we all understand how to use the invisibility pots for each instance we're working on.

Do you prefer a haste, mastery or avoidance build? I started w/ heavy mastery and just recently switched to haste to try and up our dps.

Are you using tanking or dps trinkets or a combination of the two? I noticed some (OP dks especially) like to utilize dps gear and such to output more dps. I currently just run in tanking stuff.

Is there something critical I'm missing that's keeping me from handling these large pulls?

You need to use hard CC on the larger packs wherever you can. For example, Glyphed Blinding Light becomes a 3 second AoE stun, which can help you a lot, or help others as you're trying to grab all the aggro. Other classes have similar AoE stuns, or might have to talent into them. They need to use them.

Also, AoE slows can be really helpful, as once you've established aggro, you can start kiting the mobs around a little, not taking the full possible damage.

Snares however do NOT work (unless your party consists purely of ranged). Be really careful if you bring something like a frost mage along. Having the mobs snared at the wrong moment, and bye bye goes your melee DPS, or your caster/healer who wasn't in the correct spot.

Some packs contain 1 or 2 casters that really hurt. After a wipe, check your combat log. Have people interrupt/stun/focus fire these casters down.

In short: You're not meant to take all that punishment to the face!

I use Strength Flask and Food. I bring both Strength and Armor pots, using whichever seems most required at the time, but always remember when you need to keep your CD available for invis pots.

One thing to remember when handling large pulls is that you want to take damage initially because it's important to get your Vengeance high for DPS. Your pattern for large pulls should be to chain cooldowns and then once your cooldowns are going to wear off then switch to Stuns.

So with your group composition, you should be able to do something like this on big pulls:

Opening with a stun chain is not good for DPS, since it causes you to get no Vengeance at the time when you're trying to burn stuff down. If the pack has a caster, though, I'll often HoJ them early on, since I know Stun will be off DR by the time the stun chain starts.

Don't forget you have Earth Elementals too that can help you survive. Again, drop them only after you have some Vengeance.

To address Temple of Jade Serpent specifically, the biggest ways to gain time are as follows:(1) Pull the Wise Mari trash up into Wise Mari's area so that you start the Wise Mari encounter. You gain lots of time by killing that trash while the encounter is going on.(2) For the library, you can jump on the railing right after entering, and hit one of the final 3-pack before the scroll. This will cause the entire library trash to aggro together, and you can just DPS it down all at once. Probably want Earth Elementals here.(3) For the final room before the boss, it's actually ok not to be too aggressive. Pulling too much in that room is not necessary, especially not if you gain time from doing the Library and Wise Mari faster.(4) You can skip the last three Minions before the Sha. Just have one of your shaman aggro them and run right while the rest of the raid hangs back. Once the shaman has run them in to the right, the rest of the raid should run left and hug the wall. The shaman can then ankh, and the adds will reset. Then pull boss.

First, the buff lasts 18 seconds. Second, the profit lasts longer than the buff itself. Even with 0 haste, you get:

CS-J-X-CS-X-J-CS-X-X-CS-J-X = 7 hp, likely 8 with a GC proc in there somewhere, which means your SotR will still be running for 3-6 seconds, making the buff last closer to 21 to 24 seconds. And then you might get another 3hp during that period

First, the buff lasts 18 seconds. Second, the profit lasts longer than the buff itself. Even with 0 haste, you get:

CS-J-X-CS-X-J-CS-X-X-CS-J-X = 7 hp, likely 8 with a GC proc in there somewhere, which means your SotR will still be running for 3-6 seconds, making the buff last closer to 21 to 24 seconds. And then you might get another 3hp during that period

I know how long it lasts. The numbers reflect how long I go before popping the next cooldown. I overlap slightly with the DP+AD combo that comes next. Also remember we're talking about AOE of large pulls, and the highest DPS priority for AOE involves slower HoPo generation, so that's a tradeoff I sometimes make too if I want to do more damage.

Kihra wrote:One thing to remember when handling large pulls is that you want to take damage initially because it's important to get your Vengeance high for DPS. Your pattern for large pulls should be to chain cooldowns and then once your cooldowns are going to wear off then switch to Stuns.

So with your group composition, you should be able to do something like this on big pulls:

Opening with a stun chain is not good for DPS, since it causes you to get no Vengeance at the time when you're trying to burn stuff down. If the pack has a caster, though, I'll often HoJ them early on, since I know Stun will be off DR by the time the stun chain starts.

Don't forget you have Earth Elementals too that can help you survive. Again, drop them only after you have some Vengeance.

To address Temple of Jade Serpent specifically, the biggest ways to gain time are as follows:(1) Pull the Wise Mari trash up into Wise Mari's area so that you start the Wise Mari encounter. You gain lots of time by killing that trash while the encounter is going on.(2) For the library, you can jump on the railing right after entering, and hit one of the final 3-pack before the scroll. This will cause the entire library trash to aggro together, and you can just DPS it down all at once. Probably want Earth Elementals here.(3) For the final room before the boss, it's actually ok not to be too aggressive. Pulling too much in that room is not necessary, especially not if you gain time from doing the Library and Wise Mari faster.(4) You can skip the last three Minions before the Sha. Just have one of your shaman aggro them and run right while the rest of the raid hangs back. Once the shaman has run them in to the right, the rest of the raid should run left and hug the wall. The shaman can then ankh, and the adds will reset. Then pull boss.

This in particular was helpful. We have defiantly been pulling the trash into the Mari encounter, and popping heroism as soon as bubble goes down. Usually have 11+m left. However we've been starting big pulls with stuns a lot. We will try with a different approach, and until you mentioned it I hadn't even realized shammies had a mass stun. We were just using the locks and mine. >.< Although after a 2nd stun isn't DR basically causing them to be immune?

For the library we usually invis pot past the songbird trash in Library, and having hunter pull last pack into sha room and feign while we go opposite direction to avoid. So we could not use the invis pots and just pull all the trash and maybe get more time w/ dps pots? Not sure if that outweighs the entire skipping of packs. Either way those last 3 are nasty and if we mess anything up and pull them gold is out of reach for us they take forever to kill.

Last edited by Palabrewtis on Sat Feb 09, 2013 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Palabrewtis wrote:This is particular was helpful. We have defiantly been pulling the trash into the Mari encounter, and popping heroism as soon as bubble goes down. Usually have 11+m left.

Yeah, also remember the Wise Mari encounter progresses based off killing the adds she spawns, so what we do is mark that one with a Skull and burn it while cleaving the rest of the trash. If you focus more on the other trash and are slow to burn Skull, you're not really buying much time.

Palabrewtis wrote:However we've been starting big pulls with stuns a lot. We will try with a different approach, and until you mentioned it I hadn't even realized shammies had a mass stun. We were just using the locks and mine. >.< Although after a 2nd stun isn't DR basically causing them to be immune?

Capacitor Totem is actually the longest stun you have available, since it lasts 5 seconds. It does have an "arming time" though, so you need to give your shaman lead time as far as dropping the totem.

The way stun DR works is that the first stun goes full duration. The second one goes half duration. The third one goes quarter duration. You get 3 stuns before they go immune.

Palabrewtis wrote:For the library we usually invis pot past the songbird trash in Library, and having hunter pull last pack into sha room and feign while we go opposite direction to avoid. So we could not use the invis pots and just pull all the trash and maybe get more time w/ dps pots?

If you use an invis pot in the library, the best way to do it is to use it to skip only the first pack (Jiang and Xiang) and the first Haunting Sha right after them. You then pull all of the library trash from the fish onwards down to the scroll and AOE it down together while the Strife/Peril spawn is happening. We ended up not bothering with the invis pot so that we could keep using DPS pots and because it didn't cost that much time. We also didn't like dying and having to wait on invis pot CD.

Regarding the 3-pack at the end of the instance, I forgot you said you had a hunter. That is obviously better than using a shaman.

I ended up getting together with a cross realm group tonight of people that never met. We got gold in Scarlet Halls, another one that I was already pretty familiar with. The packs in there after the invis and after Harlan are way harder hitting and I felt much more easily managed than I did in our JS runs. The difference was Remorseless winter and Capacitor being used really well together, and the DPS ended up being quite a bit higher than it is in my normal group of people. Disc priest dpsing helps there a bit as well. I think perhaps the larger pull in Library is in order, and we'll hope the DPS pots come in more handy than the inivs.

I recently got gold in Temple of the Jade Serpent and I put a video of it on YouTube (nothing fancy fixed for a big audience just a quick capture for my guildies). Since I tank the CM as prot it might give you some hint's on how to do it, when I use CDs and some decent strats. Keep in mind that I'm far from the best prot pally out there and there is a lot of thing I can improve on as you might notice from the video (actually I have only been MS prot for a few weeks, having to change since one of our main tanks had to stop raiding).

I stack haste, I also use the haste trinket from Will of the Emperor. As for my second trinket I use the engineering one with hit, exp and haste engineering gems. For this CM I use Glyph of Holy Wrath to be able to stun the water elementals a lot.

The only hard part of this CM were the first pull when we pulls all the water elementals up to the first boss and kill them off during the first boss gauntlet. I use all my CDs during this part, I stun as often as I can and the shamys in my group helps with both stunning and summoning their elementals that take aggro and tanks some of the mobs for a short period. We wiped a lot on this pull before we started to nail it most of the trys. Also one big problem to us was that we had a holy priest as a healer. They are really bad as healers for CMs, have done both this CM and others with other healingspecs and does big pulls is a lot easier then.

For the next part we use invisspots and skips all the trash until we reach the other side of the bridge, there we pull the last back and the pack on the bridge, make sure to interrupt the once that silence as often as you can. We run with does mobs to the second boss and kills them off during the role play.

For second boss dps one of the mobs until he reaches 6 stacks, then change asap to the other and dps him until 6 stacks, then back to the first on asap. Keep doing it like that and they never go immune.

In the room for the first boss take it easy and pull one pack at a time, only moving on to the next when the mobs in the your current pack is starting to die of (if you have lot of cds ready you might be able to pull a bit more).

Third boss is easy and will die quick, make sure people don't stand in the green stuff on the ground and the healer will get aggro asap when the dragon spawn so be ready to taunt.

For the three adds before the last boss assign interrupters to each one.

For the last boss we used BL when the first adds spawn, stack up and nuke them down. For some reason on one of our tries I got 2-3 shot almost directly after the add phase, don't know if we just got unlucky or if the boss hits a lot harder after that but since that happened I always used a CD as soon as that phase ended.

As for your questions:What consumables do you prefer?I used dpsflask and 300 stats dps food. Since we didn't have any aoe-runspeedbuff in out group I used the 18 sec invisspot. I beleve I used 2 dpspots, one during the trash on the first boss and one on the last boss (you can't use one during the first boss since then the invisspot will be on cd when u need it.

Make sure that your healer have a lot of Restorative Amber, the tool tip on the item is wrong, it gives the healer full mana in 10 seconds, that's a lot faster then food,if you include the healers spirit he will get full mana in about 8 seconds. What we do in CM's is that as soon as we are out of combat the healer pops the Amber before next pack of mobs/next boss and as soon as I see that he is in amber I will pull.

If you have a leather worker make sure they have and uses Drums of Speed that movement speed boost stacks with other movement speed boosts!

Do you prefer a haste, mastery or avoidance build?I use haste, I haven't tried the others. Haste also increases your dps, good dps is important in CMs.

Are you using tanking or dps trinkets or a combination of the two?I use will of the emperor trinket + the crafter engineering trinket.

How high is the dps in your groups?If you check the video you can see our group dps as well as our individual.